Some of those lumpy sculptures by Rebecca Warren – I like them, but none have the presence and personality of de Kooning’s Clamdiggers.

There is a room devoted to Basic Design, with characteristic works by Pasmore, Richard Hamilton, Alan Davie, William Turnbull and Rita Donagh – interesting to those (like myself) following the thread of abstraction in British art.

Finally, there is a portrait by George Clausen called “Brown Eyes”, which I didn’t mention before because I was afraid it was banal and sentimental. My very unsentimental partner said it was “arresting”, however, so I mention it now.

Actually, it seems he did quite a few of the same girl, whoever she was, and when you look at several of them together, the sentimentality oozes back rather – but still….

Gert and Uwe Tobias at the Whitechapel Gallery

They are brothers, born in Romania. Went to the private view for this last week, and felt – wrongly, I’m sure – that there was a smartly black-shirted attendant behind me the whole time. There were certainly plenty of them, to stop you taking drinks upstairs or straying through wrong doors…

Upstairs were the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt, mostly from the 20s and 30s, I think, from the German mags in which they appeared. Close-ups of parts of common plants that obviously echoed – or inspired – architectural forms. Some looked like spiral staircases or pagodas or whatever; I wasn’t sure whether he was a scientist, an artist or some sort of mystic. I guessed he might be a follower of Rudolf Steiner, but nothing on the internet. That thing about natural forms reproduced in human works sounds very like Steiner to me.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov,” The Happiest Man”( underthe University of Westminster, Baker Street)

It is “under” too; down the iron stairs and turn immediately right – don’t go along the underground delivery passage, like we did. There’s notice pointing to the gallery, set just so you miss it at the foot of the staircase.

It’s a sort of underground cinema, with a little, cosy Russian room, full of knick-knacks, armchair, sofa, pictures on the wall, a kulak’s place maybe, not an impoverished peasant’s hut; you can watch the films through the window, or sit outside in the cinema.

The films are extracts from musicals of the 30s, 40s and 50s; healthy, headscarved, fleshy women, wearing their medals, running to work behind tractors or on combine harvesters; smiling, preening moustached men, flirting with the girls, Cossack hats set at rakish angles, plucking guitars – the song of the couple in the buggy sounded like “The Carnival is Over” to me – everyone happy. The film was blurred and this added to the beauty of the images; buttery, tawny cornfields, golden dust, HUGE, deep, deep blue skies, winding river (must surely be the Volga, or maybe the Don), crumbling bluffs, great, black, thunderous, rolling clouds… The same colours can be seen in Sokurov’s “Save and Protect” (his version of Madame Bovary).

So, the beauty offsets the irony, somewhat. Vassily Grossman’s “Everything Flows” has an account of the Ukrainian famine – man-made- of 1933, in which millions died and armed guards were placed outside villages to ensure that starving peasants were kept from dragging themselves towards the towns (nevertheless, some managed to make it to cities, where they presented a spectacle of horror to the citizenry). Ilya Kabakov, I read in the pamphlet, acknowledges the realities, whilst admitting to the nostalgia that these films induce in him. It’s a great exhibit and it’s free to see.

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of America

Brilliant to see this at the same time as reading Anthony Beevor’s history of WW2. Stone makes a great deal of Roosevelt’s running mate, Henry Wallace; some sort of socialist, by US standards, apparently. You get the impression from the programme that Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union all joined the war together, to crush Nazism – and then Britain and the USA sat back to let the Russians do it all. It’s not the facts he states; it’s those he omits and the spin he spins…

Promised Land

Anti-fracking film, starring Matt Damon, set in farming town in mid-West. Heart’s in the right place, but cliche-ridden (last minute conversion, emotive speech to erstwhile opponents). Good to see Hal Holbrook again, soon after Lincoln, though.